A current trend in the automotive industry is to introduce active safety systems for avoiding or mitigating collisions. Such a system generally estimates the state of objects ahead of a vehicle, for instance by using a sensor. Moreover the system generally, based on the estimated state of the object, determines if any action needs to be taken, e.g. issuing a warning to the driver or initiating autonomous braking of the vehicle.
Although a system as described hereinabove is useful for reducing the risk of a forward collision, such a system may also have some disadvantages. For instance, there may be a risk that the state of the object is incorrectly assessed. Such an incorrect assessment may result in a belated warning and/or autonomous braking which in turn may result in a potentially dangerous traffic situation.
Another disadvantage is that the incorrect assessment may result in the system issuing an unnecessary and/or inadvertent collision risk reduction task, such as a warning and/or autonomous braking. Unnecessary and/or inadvertent autonomous braking may result in a dangerous traffic situation, for instance it may result in an increased risk that a following vehicle will hit the hosting vehicle from behind. Moreover, if the system issues warnings for traffic situations which are not perilous at all, there may be a risk that the driver of the vehicle hosting the system will start to ignore the warnings issued by the system or that the driver will simply disengage the system.
As may be realized, there is a need for improvement of the active safety systems for avoiding or mitigating collisions between a vehicle and a foreign object.